The price cut is interesting- Apple tries to avoid price cuts as it is difficult to raise prices later. In this case, they seem to have themselves an out- release a retina MBA closer to the old price point and then eventually discontinue these ones. Should be a nice machine when it comes.

The 13" MBA is very nice form factor, especially with the sloped wrist pad. They would to well not to mess with it too much when they get the new range of CPUs. Improve the screen resolution and perhaps add another Thunderbolt port. Not too much to to do. I would not cut the screen size from 13" to 12" - that would be a mistake.

I think the 11.6" is still too pricey considering I think Apple is losing some sales to Chromebooks in that size. I am not saying I think Chromebooks come close to a Macbook Air 11.6". But A lot of consumers have very little concept of hardware and to them a Chromebook might perform well enough for $250. I think the 13' MBA is a perfect size for the form factor of being compact but large enough to accommodate a good size battery that can run decent hardware. You look at any PC ultrabook and you'll pay about the same. I have a older 2010 MBA 13" and its still going strong. I paid close to $1500 with SSD upgrade and more RAM. But I am glad I did, because it allowed it to stay performing well even with two OS updates. The thing with Macbook Air's is you almost need to pay for more RAM at least in order to build in a longer lifespan. I wonder how this price drop will affect refurbished MBA and older models?

Improvements to performance and battery life, especially in the tight quarters of a MacBook Air, will be marginal at best, and the $150 CPU upgrade option remains a 1.7GHz (3.3GHz Turbo) Core i7-4650U.

Apple is claiming the battery life increasing from "10 hours" to "12 hours" - A 20% increase does not seem marginal to me, and seems more noteworthy than the CPU bump. Why is this downplayed in the article - do we not believe the 20% increase numbers? Or is the number believable just still considered marginal?

I think the 11.6" is still too pricey considering I think Apple is losing some sales to Chromebooks in that size.

This shouldn't be news to you- Apple is not competing in a race to the bottom with netbooks, Chromebooks, or anything else. If other manufacturer's want to sell $250 machines making $0.5 in profit per machine Apple will let them do it. There will always be at least a small market for a quality machine and Apple will be there.

The thing with Macbook Air's is you almost need to pay for more RAM at least in order to build in a longer lifespan.

Now here I agree with you. Having only 4GB of RAM that can't be upgraded is a unnecessary lifespan limiter on these machines. Apple is sadly going for price point over quality. $50 more for 8GB standard would be good. This makes it impossible for me to recommend any of the standard configs, and I find new Apple users are unlikely to place a BTO order. They are making these machines less of an in-store impulse buy by putting this question mark over them. That said, I do believe that 4GB is OK in these machines for the average user today- Mavericks is pretty RAM efficient and these machines can swap extremely quickly due to their SSDs. I just don't know that they will hold up well over time as requirements increase.

To be honest, I'm more interested in the Broadwell delay issue. There's a remarkable lack of information on the subject; there were a wave of rumors and vaguely-informed speculation back in February, but not much since then.

I think that a Macbook Air refresh will have to wait until Intel releases their broadwell processor. Broadwell will include an improved graphics iGPU with up to 40% better performance (according to http://www.extremetech.com/computing/17 ... er-haswell ), which will allow Apple to have MacBook Airs with retina displays

Touchscreen please! And don't give me the "touchscreens won't work on a laptop" because I have been using one for more than an year and I know I feel uncomfortable on a laptop without touch screen now.

The price cut is interesting- Apple tries to avoid price cuts as it is difficult to raise prices later. In this case, they seem to have themselves an out- release a retina MBA closer to the old price point and then eventually discontinue these ones. Should be a nice machine when it comes.

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think apple price increases are even rarer than their price cuts. I can't remember the last increase. Usually they keep the price the same and enjoy higher margins as the components get cheaper.

The price cut is interesting- Apple tries to avoid price cuts as it is difficult to raise prices later. In this case, they seem to have themselves an out- release a retina MBA closer to the old price point and then eventually discontinue these ones. Should be a nice machine when it comes.

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think apple price increases are even rarer than their price cuts. I can't remember the last increase. Usually they keep the price the same and enjoy higher margins as the components get cheaper.

That's true. But they can raise prices if/when they release a whole new model. Like when they released the Retina MBP. It was priced above the older MBP. And these days the retina model is just about the only model. Although it's pricing has been coming down as well over time.

Shame these use TN displays. I'm working on saving to one for my wife to replace her, now abandoned, 2008 white macbook, and Apples deals on refurbed units is actually price competitive with Windows alternative, but gah.. that display looks like my $300 Lenevo, and I'm not dropping a grand on that sort of screen.

I think the 11.6" is still too pricey considering I think Apple is losing some sales to Chromebooks in that size. I am not saying I think Chromebooks come close to a Macbook Air 11.6". But A lot of consumers have very little concept of hardware and to them a Chromebook might perform well enough for $250.

So... Apple isn't *really* losing sales to them as they were never the target market in the first place?

The thing with Macbook Air's is you almost need to pay for more RAM at least in order to build in a longer lifespan.

Now here I agree with you. Having only 4GB of RAM that can't be upgraded is a unnecessary lifespan limiter on these machines. Apple is sadly going for price point over quality.

More like planned obsolescence. Consumers think they are saving money, but manufacturer knows they will not save much and will be back again trying to buy a replacement before long.

In all seriousness, what applications exist or are coming where most MBA owners are going to need more than 4gbs of ram? More browser tabs? Yes, more is always better, and plenty of people game on MBAs, but we've kind of run out of killer apps that need more hardware, it seems to me.

I noticed that Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are now preinstalled. Is that new?

It's been free with new Macs since Mavericks came out.

Re: battery life, the basic numbers don't change, Apple still says 9 hours for the 11" and 12 hours for the 13". Seems clear that the "increase" quoted comes from Mavericks, not the hardware refresh (remember the old numbers are from the Mountain Lion era). From the release:

"Power-efficient fourth generation Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors work in conjunction with OS X® Mavericks to give the 13-inch MacBook Air up to 12 hours of battery life and the 11-inch MacBook Air up to 9 hours of battery life."

In all seriousness, what applications exist or are coming where most MBA owners are going to need more than 4gbs of ram? More browser tabs? Yes, more is always better, and plenty of people game on MBAs, but we've kind of run out of killer apps that need more hardware, it seems to me.

And iirc Apple has ram compression tech in osx.

I don't know if it's the OS, or the apps, or both, but using a modern mac with 4 Gb of ram is a horrendous experience. We have an early 2011 15" MBP (quad-core, dual graphics cards, blablabla) whose HDD died. Apple changed it, as the warranty was still on, and put Mavericks instead of Snow Leopard. It was a history of pain and suffering, until we upgraded the ram from 4 to 16 Gb.

That experience with 4 Gb was enough for me to go straight up to the 16 Gb model when buying a late 2013 13" rMBP. Thank $DEITY I did. Here's a screenshot of its current memory usage. And that's without running any Linux VM, or compiling any software, which I do often. 4Gb there? I was born in a catholic country. I only self-inflict pain during Easter.

In all seriousness, what applications exist or are coming where most MBA owners are going to need more than 4gbs of ram? More browser tabs? Yes, more is always better, and plenty of people game on MBAs, but we've kind of run out of killer apps that need more hardware, it seems to me.

And iirc Apple has ram compression tech in osx.

Every OS since Leopard has added about 200MB to the post-boot weight of OSX. You'd struggle to get OSX 10.9 to boot and run even a few light processes in 2GB of RAM any more.

A quick look at Activity Monitor shows that iTunes, Safari, Mail, and Messages combined are sitting on about 300-400MB compressed. These are all typically background processes for the average user. I'm not going to bother counting the overhead of updater utils, virus scanners, etc, but these are easily another 100MB.

Let's realistically assume that the average user therefore sits on about 2.5GB when their Mac is close to idle. That gives you today a decent 1.5GB of usable space. Come September, most likely you'll be down to 1.3GB. The next year 1.1GB. The year after that you're below a gigabyte of free memory, and the Mac is going to start feeling sluggish when switching apps.

Assuming a five year life for a $1000 laptop, in the final year, the OS will have grown close to a gigabyte in size, and you're trying to run Word and edit a document in less than 500MB of usable RAM. That's still usable, but I wouldn't call it future proof, and if Apple don't bump the RAM for the next major refresh, that five year window isn't happening.

I don't know if it's the OS, or the apps, or both, but using a modern mac with 4 Gb of ram is a horrendous experience. We have an early 2011 15" MBP (quad-core, dual graphics cards, blablabla) whose HDD died. Apple changed it, as the warranty was still on, and put Mavericks instead of Snow Leopard. It was a history of pain and suffering, until we upgraded the ram from 4 to 16 Gb.

Firefox seems to be your main problem here. What's it doing with that 800MB?

(Skype gorging on a close to a hundred MB is pretty depressing too, it really shouldn't weigh the same as Word, but that's another story).

8GB is currently plenty for 90% of users. I can leave a lot of apps open, including heavy monsters like XCode, and NetBeans, plus forget to close Pages or Pixelmator (except for the battery drain on this one) and not notice. In practice, unless you need to run VMs, 6GB is about the current safe level, making 8GB a decent holdover for all but heavy app users.

The thing with Macbook Air's is you almost need to pay for more RAM at least in order to build in a longer lifespan.

Now here I agree with you. Having only 4GB of RAM that can't be upgraded is a unnecessary lifespan limiter on these machines. Apple is sadly going for price point over quality.

More like planned obsolescence. Consumers think they are saving money, but manufacturer knows they will not save much and will be back again trying to buy a replacement before long.

In all seriousness, what applications exist or are coming where most MBA owners are going to need more than 4gbs of ram? More browser tabs? Yes, more is always better, and plenty of people game on MBAs, but we've kind of run out of killer apps that need more hardware, it seems to me.

And iirc Apple has ram compression tech in osx.

There is numerous use cases where more than 4GB ram is useful.Firstly you get less paging (swap in/out of memory to hard drive) - but of course this is when you use up available memory.A use case where more memory is really useful is for example when running a virtual machine.In image and video editing I'd imagine more ram is useful (especially video editing).And there are many more instances.

A price cut and spec bump to the 2013 MacBook Airs doesn't preclude a new announcement at WWDC

A price cut alone - maybe not - but in addition to a spec bump only 6 weeks before WWDC - they won't be upgraded in June.

Unless they're making room in the price-chart for a Retina device.

That said, anecdotally I've been informed by a few different retailers that the 11" is not moving as well as the 13" because a lot of people start cross-shopping it against the iPad then either talk themselves up to the 13" (I guess it feels more like a laptop) or down to the iPad.

Maybe this is Apple responding to the need to make the 11" more competitive, and the 13" was forced to follow suit, at lease until a 13" Retina model hits the shelves.

Still wondering whether I'm better off upgrading now or waiting till Broadwell appears in the MacBook Air sometime towards the end of this year/beginning of next year. I'm probably better off waiting till my credit card is paid off completely then putting it to work.

There is numerous use cases where more than 4GB ram is useful.Firstly you get less paging (swap in/out of memory to hard drive) - but of course this is when you use up available memory.A use case where more memory is really useful is for example when running a virtual machine.In image and video editing I'd imagine more ram is useful (especially video editing).And there are many more instances.

I totally agree with the principle (see above), but I think his point was that none of these are typical use-cases for an MBA. Even putting aside the crappy TN screen, who edits video on an 11" ultraportable with a dinky SSD drive?

I don't know if it's the OS, or the apps, or both, but using a modern mac with 4 Gb of ram is a horrendous experience. We have an early 2011 15" MBP (quad-core, dual graphics cards, blablabla) whose HDD died. Apple changed it, as the warranty was still on, and put Mavericks instead of Snow Leopard. It was a history of pain and suffering, until we upgraded the ram from 4 to 16 Gb.

That experience with 4 Gb was enough for me to go straight up to the 16 Gb model when buying a late 2013 13" rMBP. Thank $DEITY I did. Here's a screenshot of its current memory usage. And that's without running any Linux VM, or compiling any software, which I do often. 4Gb there? I was born in a catholic country. I only self-inflict pain during Easter.

Like another poster said, dump Firefox and get a real browser. On my 4GB MacBook Air (2011) with Mavericks, I can run Parallels running Windows 7 (768MB RAM--I only use it for a few small programs), Safari, Mail, and a Java program without breaking a sweat.